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Say goodbye to books and online content. Listen to Slomo Show and learn social, local and mobile marketing.

Welcome To Solomo Show!

The SoLoMo Show is a weekly podcast that started in January of 2012. It’s hosted by Cory O’Brien and Adam Helweh, discussing the intersection of social, local, and mobile marketing and advertising. The show is recorded every Tuesday evening, and streamed unedited and live to listeners via Google+ Hangout. Final edited shows are published by Friday of the same week.

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Audience

Digital Marketers

PR Professionals

Advertising Professionals

Social Media Strategists and Practitioners

Our audience is primarily tech-savvy professionals in the marketing, PR and advertising industry who are looking to better understand current and practical information about the tools, trends, tips and techniques that will help them do their jobs better.

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Introduction

In a world full of endless marketing, finding the best way to have your marketing messages get to your target despite the noise is crucial. As average human attention decreases by day it becomes crucial to capture the attention of your audience fast. Podcasts have the potential to achieve all these. So, what should you do to increase their effectiveness?

5 Podcast Ideas to boost your Content Marketing Strategy

1. Create a theme and stick to it

Plan your podcasts adequately, stay focused and remain consistent. By sticking to a specific theme, you stand a better chance of developing a loyal following consisting of people who want to know more about your topic. So, before you embark on recording your voice and releasing it for people to hear, ask yourself a few questions like what is my primary objective? Why am I suing podcast? Should I charge a fee for my recordings? Answers to such questions will narrow your efforts to the objectives of your podcast content creations. Finally, come up with a podcast theme that best helps you attain your objectives.

2. Re-use your website content

Podcasts provide you with an excellent opportunity to reuse your blog content. This is particularly beneficial for marketers who already have useful content on their blog. So, if you don’t, start by creating great content. Once you have relevant content, come up with auditory content that mirrors the same, and proceed to connect with a section of your audience that prefers hearing information (as opposed to just reading). Not that some of your audience that ordinarily prefers written content may prefer to listen to them during such instances as while commuting, during lunch breaks and when they are just too tired to read.

3. Keep advertising Subtle

Subtlety will help you avoid consumer apathy; your audience will be put off if they feel you are overly adverting to them. However, keeping it to a minimum will help you reap from both. Listeners are willing to listen to a few marketing messages so long as they feel they are getting something valuable in return. So, remaining relevant as you keep your advertising subtle is crucial to generating optimum engagement. By ensuring your podcasts are not flooded with product promotion, you will attain your objective with your marketing strategy; one research established that podcasts are more than twice effective (successfully generate brand awareness) than banner ads.

4. Create Avenue for discussion

Podcasts create a strong bond between the creator and the audience. The act of listening to an auditory content is more intimate and deliberate than say watching a video. Listeners have a sustained attention necessary to follow along. For this reason, it is advisable to create an avenue for your audience to talk about episodes and engage with others. Create a standalone social media channel through which your podcast content can be discussed without interruption from other marketing content. Besides increasing engagement, such a discussion platform gives fans an opportunity to refer back to a series that was posted a while ago.

5. Provide additional content

Create extra content based on your podcasts to help further the discussion. Consider supplementing your auditory content with video content, blog posts or even bonus podcast series. Such extra content can attract new listeners, build constructive word of mouth or even increase engagement with your existing audience.

Conclusion

Compared to other content marketing strategies, podcasts are more accessible to your audience. They do not have to take a break from whatever they are doing to listen exclusively to your message. The fact they can listen to your audio messages while working out or driving means your audience does not have to sacrifice much to get your message.

When we first started this podcasts, we used Skype to connect, and recorded everything on Garageband. Using a combination of Skype, Garageband, Soundflower, Nicecast and LineIn, we were able to record both Adam and Cory’s audio separately, which made editing the episodes much easier. However, the setup to get everything recorded properly was rather difficult to get right, and any small change would often result in frantic troubleshooting to get everything up and running again.

When Google+ Hangouts On Air opened to the public, we knew we had to give it a shot, even though it would require us to reconfigure the entire setup. So we made a few changes, fired up Google+, started a hangout, and… nothing. Despite our best efforts, we could not get both sides of the conversation to record properly. After more than an hour of testing and configuring and breaking things, we decided to revert back to Skype for the week, and give it another shot when we had more time to tinker with everything.

Thankfully, Kasey and Dave over at the ‘Flee The Scene‘ podcast have a setup that is very similar to ours, and managed to figure out the right combination of programs required to send a conversation from Google+ Hangouts into Garageband. Since there may be others out there looking for the same information, we thought we’d share what it takes to record a Google+ Hangout, so that you can do it too:

The Setup

Line In:
Open 2 copies of LineIn. (To create a second copy, you can duplicate the application in Finder.) In Copy 1, set your microphone as the Input and “Soundflower (16ch)” as the Output. Under “Advanced…” set the Output Left channel to 3, and the Output Right channel to 4. Hit the “Pass Through” button.

In Copy 2, set Soundflower (2ch) as the Input, and “Soundflower (16ch)” as the Output. Under “Advanced…” set the Output Left channel to 1 and the Output Right channel to 2. Hit the “Pass Through” button. (This step is critical, and is what was giving us so much trouble the first time we attempted this process. For whatever reason, Google+ Hangouts will not output into “Soundflower (16ch)”, so this step takes the audio from the Hangout and makes it usable within Garageband.)

Google Hangouts:

Start a new hangout and go to the Settings. Set your microphone as the Input and “Soundflower (2ch)” as the Output.

SoundflowerBed:

In the menu bar, select “Built-In Output” under the Soundflower (2ch) section. This will let you hear the Google Hangout audio in your headphones.

Garageband:

Start a new audio recording. Under Preferences, set “Soundflower (16ch)” as the Input, and “Built-In Output” as the Output. Next, create two audio tracks, and click the red record button on both tracks to record to both at the same time. In the Info panel (the little “i” in the bottom right of the screen) select “Stereo 1/2 (Soundflower (16ch))” as the Input Source for one track (this will be the output from whoever is in the Google Hangout). On the other track, select “Stereo 3/4 (Soundflower (16ch))” as the Input source (this will be your audio from the microphone).

(Note: This setup is designed to work on a Mac, since that’s what we use to record. If you have a PC… you should probably just go buy a Mac.)

Hopefully that helps someone else out there as much as it helped us, since we know from firsthand experience just how frustrating this setup can be!

If these instructions worked for you, or if you have any questions, or if we missed anything that you want to add, be sure to let us know!